Endless Possibilities
by Dynamite3539
Summary: Headcanon backstory for gym leader Rosalind from fangame Pokemon Uranium
1. Chapter 1

Ten Years Ago…

 _His voice soared to the rafters, reverberating from the sides of the hall, filling the room with such palpable emotion that the woman before him sank to her knees, tears streaming down her face._

" _I love you, Lizzie. I've been such a fool to deny it."_

 _He took her hand and knelt down to kiss it. Silence fell as the piano whispered the opening chords of the grand finale, a duet for the star crossed lovers which would crescendo into a bold and infinitely moving declaration of passion._

In the third row from the back, a young girl watched on, her eyes wide. She felt her heart rise with the music, and her lips parted ever so slightly as she imagined herself calling in answer the man on the stage, herself a part of the wonderful story, the fragile world built up so believably from a plain and empty stage.

As the curtain fell amidst rapturous applause, the girl caught sight of Lizzie through a crack in the drapes – she was wiping off her makeup, taking off her wig…

"Mummy," the girl tugged on her mother's sleeve. "Was Lizzie a man?"

Her mother gave an ebullient laugh, her cheeks rosy with the excitement of the opera. "Of course, dear. They were all men."

"But why?" she pouted. "Wouldn't it be even better with a woman?"

Her mother's laugh caught and strained. "Don't be silly, Rosalind. Illusion and deception, those are a man's job. Us girls just come along for the show."

"I could do it," Rosalind said defiantly. "I want to try."

Her mother let out an exasperated sigh. The child was ruining her mood. She came here to be entertained, distracted, taken away. Not to think about the state of the real world.

"What do you want a stale job like that for?" she responded tersely, trying not to let her irritation show. "Spending all day pretending to be someone else. You don't need that when you're perfect the way you are."

Her mother pulled her face into a reassuring smile, and quickly turned away with a peal of laughter, joining her friends' gossip about the play.

Rosalind's first time at the opera, age ten. She gazed with tumultuously mixed feelings past the knots of spectators, to the quiet stage which she now knew could be brought to such unlikely and spectacular life.

A sparrow flittered in the corner of the platform, a lively and heartfelt dance. It was shooed away by the caretaker's broom, and Rosalind thought then that she knew how it must feel…


	2. Chapter 2

Dusk had well and truly settled over the streets of Venesi City by the time Rosalind's family left the opera house.

The warm yellow light of street lamps struck and danced on the surface of canals which ran insidiously alongside roads, beneath bridges, hugging the dry islands of the city. The rivers would run day and night, in rain or shine, whether there was anyone out to watch them or not. The rivers always ran.

"Did you have a good time?" one of her mother's friends addressed her from atop stacked heels and expensive furs.

"Yes," Rosalind answered. "I would want to go again."

A group of Ratsy scurried across the street in front of them, and her mother drew up her long skirts with a screech. Rosalind noticed that one of the small rodents bore the tail of a sparrow… curious.

The park Gargryph drew itself into solid stillness as they passed, but Rosalind saw the last twitch of its tail and lifted her hand in a wave.

"…my first time, – who's there?!" the friend was still talking and Rosalind quickly consolidated the soliloquy in her head lest she be quizzed on it later.

"That one is a Gargryph, the third one from the left."

The friend squinted into the park. "Those mangy statues? You are a funny child."

Rosalind was scowling as they approached their apartment block. "Ros is such a funny child," her mother was saying, her high-pitched pealing laughter carrying in the night. "She told me she wanted to act in the opera…" The women burst into a fresh round of laughter.

"Child," the friend said kindly. "You'll understand when you're older. This is just how the world works."

"Next week she'll want to be a nurse, or a Ranger," her mother assured her friends. "You know how kids are."

But Rosalind had never felt about anything the way she felt now. She imagined what it would be like, to put on a mask and become whoever she wanted… She would never be talked down to again, she would be powerful, and free, and she would have a secret.

Reality was a powerful weapon, more so because nobody expected it to be.

Control of a gun was fearful; control of reality could bring hope or an apocalypse on the entire world. Rosalind felt dizzy thinking about the possibilities. She didn't have to be a nurse or a ranger. She could be both. She could be nothing, or everything…

"A girl in the opera!" the friend said again, her voice reaching upstairs and creeping under Rosalind's door. "What a preposterous idea!"

"The poor child," said another. "She just doesn't understand… How women are too easy to read, just like she is. How could a woman hope to dedicate herself to an illusion?"

There was a scuffle beneath the window. The Ratsy with the bird tail, hounded by a pack of snarling Tancoon… Rosalind whistled to distract the dogs, but it was no use. They advanced on the hapless rodent…

Little Rosalind gasped. Right before her eyes in that alley down below, the Ratsy dissolved as if in some cosmic acid bath, and from the ensuing space rose a perfectly formed, magnificently feathered Eshouten.

The Tancoon whimpered and ran, tails between their legs, as the creature began to attack them with its wings. Rosalind's heart beat faster; she noticed the unmarked fur of the Tancoon as they ran underneath the lamps. Could it be possible… that this was all an illusion?

Though the Eshouten was large, not a leaf stirred beneath its beating wings. The Tancoon had been so terrified, that perhaps the pain they felt had only been an expectation affirmed by a visual illusion.

Rosalind's breathing caught many times as she tiptoes down the stairs, tiptoed past the kitchen and eased open the front door. She could not let this go. There was something about this creature which stirred the dream inside her until she felt ready to burst at the seams.

She pulled her cardigan tighter around her as the cool evening breeze nipped at her arms. The big stone blocks of the apartment were damp to the touch, and a candy wrapper crunched underfoot. Eshouten was startled by the found, and fled behind the bins.

"Hey," Rosalind said, crouching down and craning her head forward.

"It's okay, I'm not going to hurt you." She made her voice gentle.

There was no sound from behind the bin.

Rosalind coughed and swept back her curly black hair. "Well hello there, little miss," she drawled in her deepest voice, mimicking the intonations of Lizzie's handsome lover. "Might I have the pleasure of knowing your name?"

She giggled despite herself. Poking her head round the edge of the bin, she could see the pokemon lurking in the shadows, an indistinct blur, its stature reduced again to that of a Ratsy or a small bird.

Seeing that it wasn't running, Rosalind plopped herself down on the pavers and leaned against the empty bin.

"I saw what you did just then," she said amicably. "How'd you do it? I would very much like to learn."

A soft cooing… for a split second Rosalind was certain she'd been sat talking to a pigeon, and blushed deeply. But she remembered her new friend's special abilities. I'll show her she's not alone, Rosalind thought as a matter of fact.

"It's a cold, cold night," Rosalind said, letting her hair fall over her face and her imagination run. "All I ever wanted was a friend…" She hugged her knees and gazed up at the strip of starlit sky between the crowded rooves.

"I can't help thinking, this can't be as good as it gets. But maybe I'm wrong. Would you come with me, and we can move on together?"

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light," came a voice from beside her. Rosalind jerked her chin up, wide eyed. The shadow in the corner was unoccupied… the strange hollow cooing came again from her shoulder. An unassuming white and black bird with an eyespot on its sparrow-like tail feathers. It sat preening on her right shoulder and played with the long strands of her hair.

"Did you just speak to me, birdie?" Rosalind asked, not even a little afraid. What a wonderful pokemon.

"I might have," the voice came again, but the birdie didn't move.

"Depends if you count what happens in your head as… reality."

Rosalind giggled. "I can really hear you."

"You mean you're not going to shake your head and say, 'well, well. I must be going quite mad'?"

Rosalind pouted. "Don't you think that would be just a little rude?"

The birdie chuckled, the sound hollow and foreboding. "You're getting too close," said the voice in her head.

"What makes you sure," Rosalind said, daring to let herself go, "that the person you're meeting is really me?"

The birdie looked at Rosalind and Rosalind looked back, and she felt that the next act of her life was beginning in earnest.


	3. Chapter 3

Present…

"How is the levee holding up?" Amara asked, her face wrinkled with concern. Ravin's expression didn't look good. He fiddled with the standard-issue Ranger radio strapped to his waist.

"Came close at high tide yesterday. You can't hold back the sea, Amara."

"And what about the Last Resort?"

Ravin sighed. "You know I can't talk about the Last Resort."

Amara turned away, frustrated. "The seas are driving the regions apart. Don't let them destroy us, too."

But as the months dragged on, it became clear the Rangers were fighting an indomitable wave of advancing destruction, a danger so stealthy that years had passed, years of imperceptibly slow erosion and culmination of power in the dark underbelly of the city.

It wasn't until the first floods, the first waves lapping at buildings which had stood resolute for centuries, that people were forced to stop and look around – at themselves, at their lives, and values, and choices.

And Amara guessed. She tore herself apart in the lonely hours of the night, weaving alternate realities in her head, worlds after every Last Resort her mind would alight on. She could no longer concentrate on the mundane everyday cuts and scrapes at the Pokemon Centre when she knew the very ground beneath her was shifting.

And Ravin was never home anymore.

Amara would sing to the stars in the night, willing the seas to rest and bring her lover back to her.

"I can no longer bear it," Amara said one night to her pokemon companion. "The last update from Ravin shows him far out in Maskara Channel. Will you come along and keep me safe, Masking?"

Disguising herself as a Ranger, Amara hired a small boat the next day, and her imposing Empirilla struck confidence into the hearts of those who saw her off.

The seas were choppy, and the small motored dinghy struggled to power through. But at long last on the horizon rose the cluster of islands where she knew she would find him. Neither ninja nor pirate had accosted her on the long journey – she knew it was fate that she should reach him.

Her voice rang clear in the cold night air as she sang to him…

But the water had begun to boil, first a slight bubbling, now a ferocious seething of the waves as something from deep below tossed the ocean into tumultuous disarray.

A mere hundred feet from the shore, Amara was locked terrified to the wheel of her boat as the huge writhing form of the sea monster Baitatao rose from the churning water. It let out a deathly roar which seemed to rend the very fabric of space.

"What are you doing?!" a voice from the shore bellowed towards her. "Get back to the beach, now! That's an order, Ranger!"

Amara's usually might voice had deserted her.

"Ravin…" she whispered, as the mighty legendary threw itself towards her.

"Tell you Empirilla, use Protect!" Ravin roared, reaching into his bag for a pokeball.

Protect, the regulation fourth move of all Ranger companions.

As Ravin's Yatagaryu uncoiled its powerful body and storm clouds rolled in overhead, Amara folded to the floor of her boat and huddled against her Masking, the newly fallen cold ran biting through her thin jacket.

The ocean beast Baitatao raised its giant head from the sea one final time, poised in sweeping, terrifying glory above the stricken boat.

"Yatagaryu, use Thunder!" Ravin ordered, and the dragon screeched, the clouds responded in unison with a deafening crack of colliding air masses and a brilliant flash of electricity exploded from the centre of the storm, forcing a hundred thousand volts into the body of the ocean beast.

The water surface around it started to boil afresh as power ran through its skin, and the boat was consumed in the ensuing cauldron, sucked into a vortex which gained horrifying speed as the howling beast sank back down into its watery domain.

Ravin was already in the water as the vortex died down, but it was too late… there was no sign of the boat, or the Ranger and her pokemon.

Ravin shook his head, dripping in the rain storm, crouched on hands and knees on the beach. "I'm sorry!" he called. "I'm sorry, friend!"

He was answered by only the thunder.

Project Last Resort was abandoned the very next day. Ravin and his team held a short service on the beach in Maskara Channel, and returned defeated to Venesi City.

But as they drew closer to the town, Ravin's eyes grew wide. The huge curving levee which sheltered the city from powerful easterly tides… sat high and dry on an ancient coastline long since submerged. The saltwater canals which had threatened to swallow streets and houses had shrunk back to their historical levels, tamed into submission.

"It worked," Ravin said incredulously, hardly daring to believe it himself. "We did it!" Disbelieving, joyful laughter rose up amongst the Rangers, and they hugged each other in relief and gratitude.

Ravin rushed home immediately. "Amara darling!" he called as he ran in through the door. "Amara, the water is gone!"

But alas, on the mantelpiece, a handwritten note… "I have gone to find my love. Don't wait for me. – Amara"

Shaking with disbelief and worry, Ravin ran to the dockside. The boat hire clerk sat smoking on the wooden pier. "You have tamed the beast, Ravin," he said in greeting with a crinkled smile.

"Have you seen Amara? She said she was coming to find me," Ravin babbled, consumed with anxiety.

The old man shook his head sadly. "No, Ravin. She wasn't here." And after a period of silence, "But she must have made it. It's said Baitatao will only appear to the one acting out of great unconditional love for another. It's drawn to this emotion it cannot feel."

Tears ran down Ravin's face.

"Did a female ranger with an Empirilla pass by yesterday?"

The old man's face lit up. "Why, yes… You don't mean to tell me…" He trailed off in horror.

Ravin turned to face the sea. "My love… Though the city has been saved, I can feel no happiness. I pray the fishes treat you with the affection you deserve, more than I ever could provide to you."

Ravin sang to the ocean, and in the gentle lapping of the waves, Amara sang back.


	4. Chapter 4

"Bravo!" the lone member of the audience was on his feet, filling the cavernous space with thunderous applause. "This is going to be a sell-out!"

Sal collapsed to the stage, puffing with exertion from the final song.

"Yeah!" he whooped, raising his arms towards the ceiling.

"I still hate that line about the fishes," Curtis said, emerging from the wings and pulling off his long blonde wig. "It's obvious Baitatao is just gonna eat her."

"You're a star, Curtis!" the director boomed, his expensively clothed arms open wide. "I've never seen such a realistic depiction of Amara, or any woman at that! How do you do it?"

"I shouldn't want to give away my secrets," Curtis said with a wink.

Sal shot his co-star a double thumbs up.

"We open tomorrow night!" the director addressed the cast. "Go home and get some rest. Tell the wives no – if there's any night they need to let you be, it's tonight!"

With his characteristic booming laughter bouncing from the walls, the director took his exit.

Curtis leaned against the wooden replica dock as the stagehands wheeled out other sections of the set, and refilled special effects tanks and hydraulic mechanisms. Technology had come a long way since the likes of _Lizzie_ , but the plays were all the same in their essence. They did seem to be taking more of a morbid turn though; the Venesi crowd was becoming more and more sadistic in its tastes.

"You got a wife?" Curtis called to Sal, sweeping his mop of curls out of his eyes.

"No," Sal replied, yawning and stretching out luxuriously on the sea. "You?"

"Nah," Curtis said dismissively.

Sal grinned. "I didn't think so, you seemed too young." He fidgeted with his Ranger uniform. "I was married once."

Curtis raised an eye row. "Oh yeah?"

"I ended it when I realised she was trying to use me as a leg up into the industry. Thought she could get me to bend the rules for her."

Curtis let out a strained laugh. "Lame, huh?"

Sal shrugged, to Curtis's surprise. "I thought it was sad, actually. But we couldn't deny it, she didn't love me."

"I'm sorry," Curtis said, leaning forward to place a hand on his colleague's shoulder…

"Look, you're a cool guy, Curt. I know you won't take this the wrong way. The rules are antiquated, there isn't a day goes by when I don't think about how unfair it is."

"Me too… Something needs to change."

"But you know, a woman would be laughed off the stage before she ever had a chance to prove –" Sal broke off with an amused chuckle.

Curtis quickly removed his hand from Sal's shoulder which he realised he'd forgotten to do.

"You're looking at me like Amara," Sal said, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards. "But relax a little, take a break, it'll help for tomorrow. Let me get to know the real Curtis, hey?"

Curtis relaxed his face and let a big breath out. He plopped himself heavily onto the dock. "You're right. It's too easy to get lost in the story." They laughed it off.

"You know who I would love to look at me that way?" Sal lapsed back into comfortable conversation. "There's this amazing girl who used to live on my block… I never knew what she did but it must've been glamorous. Talking with her was like… I always felt so inadequate, she was smart. Not numbers smart, though I don't know about that. Smart, as in you'd still be thinking about what she said days later, wondering what she meant and how she could hold that power over you."

"Deep, huh?"

"Like the void." Sal snapped his fingers. "Her name was Rosalind."

Curtis's mouth twitched. "Was she hot?"

Sal laughed. "That is so you. Yeah… she wasn't half bad. She had awesome black hair, blacker than the rest of the world looked next to her."

"Poetic." Something had changed in Curtis. He was smiling.

Sal grinned. "I've been practising the past six months, for when I see her again. So, you know, I can say something back."

Curtis gave him a smoky look. "Pretend I'm Rosalind," he said. "You can never go wrong with a dress rehearsal."

Sal cracked up laughing. "This would be so weird if we weren't theatre guys."

"Theatre guy?" Curtis pouted and raised a brow. "Who do you think you're talking about?"

"Woah man!" Sal was up on his elbows and backed away, hands up. "That was creepy man," he continued, laughing. "She used to talk just like that –"

"C'mon guys," the stage manager tapped on the wooden dock. "You heard the man. Go home! We'll finish up here."

"Thanks Jase," Sal sighed, hauling himself up. "Rosalind…" he extended a hand to Curtis with a wink.

The stage manager looked between them with a baffled expression and shook his head.


	5. Chapter 5

Rosalind took off her coat, threw her keys onto the mess accumulating on the hallway table, and examined herself in the mirror.

How badly was it possible to want something?

"Masking, I know you're in here," she called.

She rifled through the bills on the table – gas, electric, water… the paycheck for the new show wouldn't come through until tomorrow, and half of these were overdue…

She looked at the clock on the wall. 1.30 am. Later today then, technically. These night shifts at the tavern served to tide her over for now, but damn was it exhausting. She thought about what her socialite mother would say, the mother who had disowned her on her 18th birthday as a disgrace to the family name.

It was hard out here, but Rosalind knew she could never have lived the life of her parents, conforming so effortlessly to the societal roles carved out for them. Rosalind never saw those as more than a mindset, as easily broken as a fourth wall, but for her parents and the rest of high society they were as solid as the double glazed glass in their windows.

"It's not real," young Rosalind would argue, much to the horror of her mother. "It's all in people's heads, that women can't do this, and women can't do that. And when it's all in your head, you can bend the rules as you like. You just have to try."

"If you're as good of an actor as you say," her mother would reply curtly, "why can't you play the role of a socialite? It should be easy for you."

Rosalind had never been able to answer that.

The door closed on her not long after. That was solid, that was real.

It had been refreshing when she met Sal at her last place, before the landlord gave her the boot. Sal seemed sympathetic to the oppressed, and obviously had a massive crush on her brains which was a nice change. Her wit improved with the appreciation.

"You're always acting. You're still acting," she would tell him with a mysterious look. "I wonder who I'm talking to today?"

She didn't know where half of this came from, but she enjoyed making him think.

Her phone pinged and brought her back to the present. A message from Sal. 'You up? I can't sleep.'

Rosalind's mouth twitched.

"Be careful who he talks to," said a Spritzee hovering by the window, its pinkish fairy wings mottled with eyespots.

"It's not gonna be a Spritzee," Rosalind yelled, diving onto the bed and sending the Spritzee zipping for the cover of the high ceiling.

Masking let down its illusion and alighted on Rosalind's back, helping her undo her waitress's uniform. "You were never like Spritzee either," Masking said in her head. "The real you, I mean."

"And you would know that how…?" Rosalind sprawled on her back, laughing, letting the summer night air from the fly-screened window settle over her.

'Are you thinking about me?' she typed back to Sal, winking to Masking.

'Yes, or the you I think I know.' Rosalind was impressed, he really had been practising. She was highly amused by his willingness to continue the "dress rehearsal".

'And what if I wasn't like how you thought? Not glamorous, or smart, but a mere illusionist, a deceiver of those around me?'

'Then I should think you smarter and more glamorous than before.'

Rosalind pursed her lips and thought for a moment before replying.

'If I were to bring Rosalind to you after the show tomorrow, would you ask her out, no matter what?'

Sal's excessive use of emojis was back as he relaxed from his practise courting run. 'Yeah, I'd do that man! How do you know her anyway?!'

'Too many questions,' Rosalind typed back with a smirk. 'Don't forget your promise.'

She looked out of the window at the full moon high in the sky. That evening, the opera house would be packed for a sold out show. Perhaps her mother would be there. She was going to blow them all away in the Maskara Channel, and then she would do it all over again in the real world.

'Thanks Curtis,' Sal texted back. 'Good night.'

It was time to show the world just how dedicated a woman could be to her illusion.


	6. Chapter 6

"I pray the fishes treat you with the affection you deserve, more than I ever could provide to you," Ravin lamented to the sea, and from the eaves Rosalind came in for the final heartfelt duet.

At the conclusion of the ending note, the entire audience rose to its feet, creating such a cacophony of sound it seemed the very foundations of the building shook, and it felt like the ceiling would surely cave in from the tremendous pressure.

As Rosalind took her place with the cast for the bows, she was choked up with emotion looking out on the lights, the crowd of happy faces, the people she'd helped forget themselves for the night, cheering for her from every corner of the theatre. This moment she had dreamed about her entire life, from the time she first saw _Lizzie_ here on this stage, this moment she had surrendered her everything to reach…

"Amara! Amara!" a group in the back was chanting. "Amara!"

They wanted to hear her sing again.

The director walked out to intervene and lap up some of the glory for himself. He grabbed a microphone from the front of the stage and threw his arms wide. "Introducing the brightest up-and-coming talent in East Tandor, our very own Curtis Fallon!"

The crowd went wild.

"Curtis will sing for you again!"

They love it. They would take every inch she gave.

But Rosalind had a date to keep, and a due to pay…

Behind the curtain, she dressed in her everyday clothes, stripped off the chest binder and the eyebrows, threw them aside… She let down her hair.

And when the curtain rose again, the rapturous applause of the audience died out, replaced by a stunned silence.

"Wha… Who…" The director struggled to retain his composure. "Who are you?! Where is Curtis?!"

Rosalind took a deep breath. "I am Curtis," she said. "I am also Rosalind."

Too late, she saw her mother in the third row, raising her perfectly manicured hand to her mouth. A restless murmuring stirred in the crowd, and Rosalind felt tears rise up inside. She crushed the feelings with inhuman strength, and stood her ground. The murmurings rose to fever pitch.

"If I could stay…" a powerful voice rang out from across the stage, and the hall fell silent.

Sal took another breath. "In your world…"

The first lines of the final duet.

The spectators waited, frozen as if in a trance, their beliefs, their delicately constructed world poised on the brink as a fragile glass orb on the edge of a pedestal.

The horrified director backed away, motioning to the stagehands with disjointed, confused gestures, but alas they could not understand him.

The curtain remained raised.

And Rosalind sang. She sang her heart out. She sang for all the years she'd hidden herself away, all the years she'd spent growing restless in the biggest misconception of them all. She sang for the life she could've had, the life she hoped all the little girls out there would someday be able to choose.

And as she and Sal hit the climactic note together in perfect harmony, a burst of flame behind them threw the stage into vibrant and heart-warming illumination, and a Pajay rose from behind the replica dock, its majestic cry speaking of hope, rebirth and undying determination.

Above all, they spoke of freedom.

"I've got your back, partner," said an amused voice in Rosalind's head, and the Pajay flew off as if into the picturesque sunset backdrop…

Sal reached out to hold her as they finished the song, made somehow more intense by the lack of accompaniment. "I made a promise to a friend last night," he said with a grin. "Rosalind, will you go out with me?"

She leaned in to kiss him, and they could've heard a pin drop in the auditorium.

Then the clapping began. Rosalind never looked away from Sal long enough to find out where it started, but she's ever since held the belief that it started in the third row. One solitary supporter, then another, and another until half the crowd was up on its feet. The applause was thunderous.

Rosalind looked up to see her mother wiping away a tear, smiling.

And she knew then that it was going to be all right.


	7. Chapter 7

There are no miracles in life, and society tolerates change only slowly.

Venesi City was no different. But on that very day, something began to give. The rigid scaffold of tradition gradually came to be seen in a new light. People opened up to each other, they started to talk about bigger issues. The walls came down, and they were surprised and grateful to find they weren't so different after all.

Rosalind became the first female theatre star of Tandor, and others came after her. Slowly at first, cautiously, but once the floodgates opened, there was no stopping the tide. And with time, the very thought of going back to the old way was unthinkable.

The public's demand for drama was insatiable. The opera house was fashioned into a pokemon gym during the day, and strong trainers and newcomers alike came to hear Rosalind speak, and challenge her Dramsama if they so wished. Rosalind and Dramsama were inseparable.

She was the natural choice for leader.

And Sal? Well… his girlfriend's sense of humour never failed to impress him. He posed as a faux gym leader under a stage name, fighting beside the stage trapdoor which would take a challenger down to the true leader just as they'd started to celebrate.

It was the perfect conclusion to any Venesi escapade.

They fancied they were happy, and on so many days it was real.

Who knows, perhaps one day you will meet them on your very own journey!


End file.
